Research:

Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has been observed in a wide variety of eukaryotes from plants to mammals while its molecular mechanism is still unclear. Our group studies such an epigenetic inheritance process that regulates programmed DNA elimination in the ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena. Nuclear-acting small RNAs mediate the communication between the parental and gremlin genomes and we try to understand how these small RNAs are utilized to establish the epigenetic inheritance.